Grid Computing: Fulfilling the Promise of the Internet

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Internet, which
originally linked universities and laboratories around the United States as
an outgrowth of a Defense Department project begun in 1969.

How the baby has grown! The Internet began to expand from its inception,
and with the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989, it is becoming
ubiquitous. It will be as much a part of people's lives as the radio,
television, and telephone -- all of which will no doubt reside on the
Internet in the not-too-distant future.

The Internet's explosive growth has been fueled by a single factor: open
standards -- an agreement upon a common set of "protocols" enabling
computers to communicate with one another. Standards also brought Internet
mail into existence, which has had an incalculable impact upon the way we
communicate with each other. And yet another set of standards created the
Web, which has allowed everyone with a computer to trade information.

It did not take long for business to see the potential of the Internet.
Today you'd be hard-pressed to find a company that does not use the Internet
for emailing sales information to customers, or displaying Website
"showrooms," or integrating sales and supply-chain activities in order to
maintain optimal inventory levels.

As exciting as the Internet's past 30 years have been, they're only a shadow
of what's to come. We're already catching glimpses of the future in
projects sponsored by universities and pharmaceutical research labs. By
downloading a special screen saver, we can allow our personal computers to
hook into a worldwide network when we're not using the machines. Together,
this network processes information as part of the search to find cures for
cancer, HIV, and, most recently, smallpox -- processing that would take an
individual computer weeks or months, but can be done in days through this
voluntary "grid."

In a somewhat different form, grid computing -- a Web-based operation that
will allow companies to share computing resources on demand -- is where
we're headed. Simply put, grid computing uses more of a server's computing
power. Today's computers, like human brains, typically operate at only a
small percentage of their capacity; they often sit idle as a processor waits
for data. On the grid, the idle time of hundreds -- even thousands -- of
servers can be harnessed by any customer needing a massive infusion of
processing power.

Just as the electric grid provides power to the consumer, the computing grid
distributes all sorts of computing resources to solve problems. In the
process, a grid can give rise to "virtual organizations" -- ever-changing
groups of individuals and institutions exploiting the resources of the grid
for a variety of purposes, much the way that individuals in the same
household exploit electricity for their own needs.

Grid computing is the logical, and desirable, outcome of several factors.
First, the idle time inherent in computing means that by working on a grid,
computers can share operations according to their abilities and unused
capacities; thus, information will be processed with maximum efficiency.
Second, the advent of broadband enables networked computers to share data
constantly at high speeds -- critical to the functioning of any
sophisticated network.